New Housing for Hurricane's Last Victims

By MIREYA NAVARRO,

Published: February 27, 1995

HOMESTEAD, Fla., Feb. 26—
Two and a half years ago, winds of 150 miles an hour yanked the roof off Mack Johnson's apartment and sent him tumbling into homelessness. Finally, on Friday morning, he moved from Trailer No. 299 in a trailer park to a one-bedroom apartment and officially got on with his life.

Mr. Johnson could barely contain his glee: "I'm out of this rock pit."

Hurricane Andrew, when it blew through South Florida in August 1992, displaced 250,000 people. The last of them, about 180 people, trickled out of Coral Roc Trailer Park, just north of Homestead, and the nearby Sunrise Village trailer park over the weekend, the deadline for workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to relocate the remaining few and close down the temporary housing operation.

The departure of the last homeless removed one of the most visible remnants of the nation's worst hurricane, a sign of recovery but also of a devastation whose cost in property damage alone was estimated at more than $30 billion. By now, marinas and parks have reopened, new hotels and shopping malls built and about 75 percent of the 47,000 destroyed homes has been repared or replaced.

Their departure also closes an important chapter for FEMA, which is still more than a year away from finishing up hurricane business in South Florida. Widely criticized for an initial late response to the disaster, the agency stayed on to house hurricane victims.

Agency officials say the experience with Andrew taught preparedness lessons that have served victims well in other major disasters, like the Mississippi floods of 1993 and the earthquake in Southern California last year, from improvements in getting victims financial aid in days rather than weeks to coordinating emergency tasks with states.

"We saw the need to be proactive," said an agency spokesman, Morrie Goodman.

Of the hundreds of thousands of people initially displaced, most went back to houses rebuilt with insurance money or to Government-subsidized units or simply left. The southern part of Dade County, the most rural of Miami's metropolitan area where the hurricane struck, lost 27 percent of its population -- about 100,000 residents -- and is not expected to regain it until the end of the century, county officials said.

The most destitute victims were left under the care of the Government in trailers that at the height of need accommodated 3,500 familes in 12 parks. The last to leave the trailers are mostly low-income residents.

But as the people moved on and their trailers were hauled out to storage, Coral Roc offered a glimpse into how lives were rearranged after the hurricane.

Amid the unoccupied trailer pads that give this 30-acre, privately owned park the feel of a vacant lot, there are gardens of potted plants, clotheslines between electric poles, even a litter of five mutts. As the hurricane refugees moved out they left behind some people who decided to make their quarters permanent and bought their FEMA trailers for an average of $1,100 each.

Some of park dwellers said they were actually better off in their mobile homes. Miriam Florian, 24, said she and her husband, who works in a horse stable nearby, rented a room in a house before the hurricane. Now the couple and their two daughters, 2 and 4, spread out in a three-bedroom 8-by-36 foot trailer and pay $285 a month in pad rent.

"We didn't find where to rent," Mrs. Florian said. "My husband didn't have a job and we decided to spend savings to buy the trailer."

Others who had stayed said the only other option, given the scarcity of affordable housing was to leave, though many held jobs here. The park now has mostly Hispanic residents, many of them laborers on local farms. These neighbors, too, welcomed the gradual exodus of other FEMA charges. They said the park, which at its most crowded accommodated up to 230 emergency housing trailers, was noisy and contained a "bad element" that engaged in petty crime, drug dealing and prostitution.

But Coral Roc had been a trailer park with 270 families before Andrew leveled it, and for the handful of residents who returned it remains a barren shadow of its old self. Bulldozers after the hurricane cleaned out both the debris and the vegetation, leaving mostly a rubble-strewn landscape.

Even more distressing for Humberto Uton, 52, a Coral Roc resident for 14 years who lives with his 85-year-old mother, is that he could not move out. In 1992, he said, he braved the hurricane underneath a love seat and coffee table with eyes closed. His trailer gone, he used part of a $11,500 FEMA grant for replacing personal property to buy another.

Some of those moving out were sympathetic. They said it was the psychological aspect of living in a mobile home that dissuaded them from settling down in the park.

Mr. Johnson was also gathering up belongings last week -- pre-hurricane property like Bee Gees tapes and mildewed encyclopedias and items bought in the last two and half years, including a shotgun, a 9-millimeter handgun and a .38-caliber revolver. A security guard who works a night shift, he said his trailer on the edge of the park had been burglarized four times and he had been mugged once despite 24-hour security paid for by the Government.

Vilma Vela, a spokeswoman for FEMA's Miami field office, said crime in the park was "no more than any other neighborhood." But like others of the homeless, Mr. Johnson several times rejected the housing found for him and chose to stay in his furnished, rent-free FEMA trailer. Mr. Johnson said he found two previously offered apartments dilapidated and "a dump."

"I pay taxes. I'm a war vet," he said. "If I choose to live as a human being that's my right."

He is now in a $590-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in a building that was just built. From Louisiana, he moved here in 1991 with his wife andplans to continue part-time studies at Miami Dade Community College for a degree in math and criminology and eventually move out of Florida.

In the meantime, the search for housing will no longer dominate his thoughts.

"I hope I can look back at this and say, "At least I survived,' " he said.

Photo: The last of 250,000 Floridians displaced by Hurricane Andrew moved out of temporary housing over the weekend, meeting the deadline of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On Friday, Mack Johnson packed his things, including a weapon used to ward off burglars at Coral Roc Trailer Park. (Keith Meyers/The New York Times) Map of Homestead Fla.